For every man worth meeting, a thousand others come to the beach with masked emotions and wearing money on their faces.
This Is How She Wakes
Needing to Feel Thankful
The road map is also red, and it will cost me if I’m late for my presentation. With two boys in college, I’m counting on the promotion and raise. We need a larger apartment and a car worth more than the gas in its tank.
A good run; Arrangements; Cleaning; Doubts; Poetry of Age
Arrangements
I will belong to that city I die in, mourned in that language.
Little Ray Takes a Break
“I never did understand what you saw in that boy,” she began.
Mother’s Teeth; Shopping List
In the prairie across from My mother’s apartment, We find, in the moonlight, Bones, laying humble On the black ground, More ash than dirt, From the controlled burn The firemen had to set.
The Giant of Abilene, Texas
The house, a simple box nailed to a concrete slab on the flat surface of West Texas, had fallen into disrepair in the years since he was a boy. A window on the side was punched out and the jagged center was patched with cardboard; the masking tape had released its hold long ago. The window had once been the window to his bedroom. He got out of his rented red Ford and went to look. The houses on the left and right were close; the rock fights had been in earnest. The cheap siding, a dirty white vinyl, was cracked in places, probably from the hailstorms that came every summer. There were broken children’s toys in the yard. No one was home.